Normas oficiales mexicanas resumen

Beyond Global Summitry: Food Sovereignty as Localized
Resistance to Globalization
JEFFREY AYRES & MICHAEL J. BOSIA
Saint Michael’s College, Colchester, Vermont, USA
ABSTRACT Recently there has been a marked shift reflecting increased theoretical interest and
political practices embracing strategies of localism or relocalization against neoliberal
globalization. Specifically,individuals, farmers, and communities embracing the framework of
food sovereignty have increasingly adopted localism tactics in response to the globalization of
food systems, the corporate agribusiness model, and attendant food crises. The spread of the
food sovereignty concept from the global peasants’ movement Vı´a Campesina to locales as
diverse as industrial France and the rural state of Vermont inthe United States demonstrates
the way in which food sovereignty has been appropriated in different international settings.
Additionally, the turn toward localism merits further scrutiny as a reflection of an unsettling of
forms of collective resistance at a moment of structural crisis in global capitalism. Localism as
an alter-globalization tactic is still overshadowed by protest summitry andlarge-scale
mobilizations, when small-scale micro-encounters arguably are part of a growing, broader,
and more nuanced process of transnational diffusion of resistances, struggles, and
reformulations over sovereignty at multiple political and social scales.
Keywords: food sovereignty, neoliberal globalization, localism, microresistance, France,
Vermont, global agribusiness,alter-globalization
The June 2006 ‘Chicken Pizza Direct Action’ is folkloric. Vermont restaurant owner George
Schenk challenged state authorities by threatening to serve chicken from a nearby farm in his
restaurant without proper state certification. Schenk, the founder and president of American Flatbread,
qualified his ‘entrepreneurial nonviolent civil disobedience’ (St Peter, 2006) as a means of
raisinggreater awareness about regulatory barriers that undercut the rights of citizens to choose
where and from whom they buy their food. Schenk’s defense of food sovereignty challenged
Correspondence Addresses: Jeffrey Ayres, Department of Political Science, Saint Michael’s College, Colchester,
Vermont 05439, USA. Email: jayres@smcvt.edu; Michael J. Bosia, Department of Political Science, SaintMichael’s
College, Colchester, Vermont 05439, USA. Email: mbosia@smcvt.edu
ISSN 1474-7731 Print/ISSN 1474-774X Online/11/010047–17 # 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2011.544203
Globalizations
February 2011, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 47–63
government policies favoring industrial agribusiness and factory farmed meat at the expense of
small farmers and consumers knowledgeable about the sourceand safety of their food. While the
farm in question sold chickens directly to consumers, it could not sell to retail businesses without
a state approved slaughterhouse facility. Remarked Connie Gaylord, whose chicken farm lies
directly across the street from American Flatbread, ‘why force us to do something which
means we get bigger . . . why can’t local just stay local . . . why doeseverything have to come
from far away?’ (Porter, 2006).
Eighteen months later and across the Atlantic, the more renowned farmer Jose´ Bove´, from the
French region of Larzac, launched a hunger strike to win a one-year ban on genetically modified
(GMO) crops. A worldwide activist-celebrity and one-time anti-neoliberal candidate for president
of France, Bove´ popularized food sovereignty by associatingGMO seeds and other
symbols of food’s global commodification with threats to the rural way of life and the quality
of food stuffs, concerns widely shared by the French population. Ridiculing the government’s
proposed temporary ban on the commercial use of GMOs, Bove´ argued that his action, in
concert with a dozen other activists, called attention to research questioning the safety of...